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Carlsbad nonprofit offers unique solutions to benefit humans, wildlife, and the environment

San Diego's ECOLIFE Conservation continues to link conservation of habitat and sustainable agriculture to help save our planet

Bill Toone, founder and interim director of ECOLIFE Conservation, at the nonprofit’s Aquaponics Innovation Center in Escondido
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Image Credits Vincent Knakal

In school, we are taught that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. When it comes to conservation, however, the link between goals and actions doesn’t always appear so linear. But ask just a few questions, and the connections that bind seemingly disparate things — say, monarch butterflies and cooking stoves — are clear as day.

Bill Toone, founder and interim director of Carlsbad-based nonprofit ECOLIFE Conservation, learned early on that going the direct route to take action in saving land and species wasn’t simple. Toone is a conservation biologist who successfully led the efforts to save the California condor from the brink of extinction through work at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park (then the San Diego Wild Animal Park) in the 1980s. “In my early years, [with] the California condor program, it was lawsuit after lawsuit,” Toone remembers. “I got involved in local land conservation, and it was battle after battle. I just was desperate to find a way to make it so that it was not controversial — that we weren’t doing this through lawsuits — and simply being able to demonstrate that there were steps we could take that would benefit us immediately, and our environment.” 

In 2003, Toone founded ECOLIFE Conservation. Though the organization’s two primary functions are conservation of habitat and sustainable agriculture, it might be surprising to some how these efforts are activated.

Bill Toone, founder and interim director of ECOLIFE Conservation, at the nonprofit’s Aquaponics Innovation Center in Escondido
Bill Toone, founder and interim director of ECOLIFE Conservation, at the nonprofit’s Aquaponics Innovation Center in Escondido

For example, much of the world’s most critical habitats are home to and controlled by indigenous people, many of whom are also underserved populations living without modern resources including proper stoves. The result: habitat destruction due to deforestation for wood as cooking fuel, and a health crisis for humans due to burns and smoke inhalation. This connection is how ECOLIFE Conservation has become, at least in part, a stove company.

One significant case of a threatened habitat is in the Mexican state of Michoacán, home to the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, where an estimated 60 million butterflies migrate annually. Through his work globally, Toone knew the threat that inefficient stoves pose to both people and the environment. After a few missteps in presenting the solution within the impacted community, he and his team began their successful campaign to build more efficient stoves for them. The people’s interest and the ultimate success came from presenting the solution as a way to improve their way of life — the benefit to the monarchs was a bonus that has become a source of pride for the people.

It would seem that such a small action wouldn’t have significant impact, but according to Toone, mitigating the impact to the environment with this simple measure “would have the equivalent climate impact for all of us of taking every car off the road in the United States, times three.”

ECOLIFE Conservation’s second major initiative, sustainable agriculture, touches something we talk a lot about in Southern California: water. The expanding agriculture necessary to feed the eight billion people on the planet is also the primary contributor to habitat loss, but by engaging farmers to collaborate, both water and land can be saved. According to Toone, California’s lettuce industry, the second largest in the world after China, uses about nine gallons of water per head of lettuce grown. Fish farming dumps about seventy percent of the water it uses every week in order to keep the fish’s growing environment clean. However, he learned, if aquaponics — a merging of fish farming and hydroponic growing methods — is used, the same head of lettuce can be grown with ten percent of the water in just ten percent of the space. “Aquaponics works by taking the nitrogen waste that the fish produce, running it through a bio bacterial filter…and breaking it down into nitrates and nitrites, which are then fertilizer for plants. We run that water under the plants, they take all the nitrates and nitrites out, and we send clean water back to the fish. So, we don’t dump any water for our fish farming and the lettuce gets all the water it wants, constantly recirculated,” Toone explains. 

As far as its effectiveness from a conservation standpoint, Toone offers another of his staggering prognoses: “If California did that, [we] could save enough water to refill Big Bear Lake four times over, or [fill] an acre-sized tower of water 5.2 times the height of Mount Everest — by implementing this only for lettuce growing in the state of California.”

On September 14, ECOLIFE Conservation will host its annual gala at the splashy, historic Lafayette Hotel and Club. The event will feature dinner from Chef José Cepeda, live and silent auctions, magic, and music from Ruby and the Red Hots. This exclusive evening is limited to 175 guests, and in addition to celebrating the organization’s successes in Mexico for the monarch butterflies, proceeds will support the ongoing work there to preserve habitat and improve the lives of its indigenous people. As with his organization’s win-win initiatives, Toone is eager to welcome people to enjoy a spectacular evening and, simultaneously, “be part of helping make the world a better place for everybody.” ecolifeconservation.org

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